Domestic violence laws are a crime against nature, according to pickup artist Roosh V

So apparently domestic violence laws are a crime against nature. Who knew?

Well, the repellent “game” guru and all-around human stain Roosh Valizadeh knows, or thinks he knows, and he devoted a long and strange post yesterday to explaining just why. Oh, and why laws forbidding bees from attacking ants are a bad thing.

We’re going to skip the bugs — they’re the main characters in a bizarre fable Roosh uses to start off his post — and move right on to the part of Roosh’s post that deals directly with human beings.

Here is his thesis, baldly (and badly) stated:

Creating laws to prop up the weak is like playing a game of musical chairs. … Domestic violence laws are a great example of this phenomenon. Assault and battery is already outlawed, but by creating a new class of laws that create privilege for a specific group, a new immunity is formed. The ecosystem is damaged, unprepared to take on the unintended consequences of misguided intervention.

Of course, by this logic, you could argue that pretty much all laws interfere with the “ecosystem.” Interesting that he only applies this argument to female victims of domestic abuse. (He seems unaware that male DV victims even exist.)

In Ukraine, I witnessed a man slap his girlfriend on a crowded pedestrian street. Over 20 men must have witnessed the event, but no one rushed to her aid. She also did nothing, not screaming or running away. With primitive (i.e. rarely prosecuted) domestic violence laws in Ukraine, you’d think that this sort of thing would happen all the time, but it was the first time I had seen it in a country that I had spent 6 months in. Men show surprising restraint when it comes to violence against their women, something that may be a shock to people living in countries with advanced domestic violence laws.

So … a guy hitting his girlfriend in public is proof of the restraint of Ukrainian men?

In the USA, with nearly two decades of such laws on the books, what do you see? Women hitting men and women attacking men they don’t even know. I’m sure you’ve seen many such videos on Youtube and LiveLeak, which make it seem like women are warriors, completely fearless of men.

I’m really not sure you can attribute any of these activities to specific pieces of legislation.

With their elevation as a special victim in need of state protection, there is usually no punishment for hitting men, even if the man hits back only to defend himself. Girl hits man, man pushes girl away, girl calls cops, man goes to jail.

The idea that a mere accusation from a “girl” will send a man to jail is simply not true. Yesterday, George Zimmerman’s estranged wife accused him of threatening her and others with a gun, and punching his father-in-law in the nose. He did not go to jail.

If she’s married, she gets an additional bonus of monthly cash payments once the divorce is settled. Encouraging a man to fight has become financially beneficial for women.

She may get awarded child support, which she’ll be lucky to collect. Very few women get alimony.

Like the ants, women know that the laws give them a pass. They are taking full advantage of it, predictably conforming to their environment. Men are demoted to second class citizens and live in fear of going to jail while women have impunity to act in any way they want. The result? Less marriage, more violent marriages, unhappy relationships, and more single parent households.

Yes, that’s right. Roosh is seriously arguing that domestic violence laws lead to “more violent marriages.” Never mind that, in fact, domestic violence has fallen dramatically in the US in the last two decades, in part because of laws like the Violence Against Women Act (which also protects male DV victims). According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, “the overall rate of intimate partner violence in the United States declined by 64%” from 1994 through 2010.

But Roosh doesn’t let things like facts get in the way of his rant.

Nature, while not perfect, has spend hundreds of thousands of years optimizing sex roles through trial and error to facilitate human reproduction. … Recent utopian schemes to “protect” women have ushered in policies that have no proven effectiveness, whether increasing the happiness of women, protecting the family unit, or advancing society in any form. They might as well have been pulled out of a top hat, an experiment done on the masses by those in power.

Yeah, “no proven effectiveness” — aside from the fact that they actually seem to have cut DV in half in less than 20 years.

Progressives, through their tinkering, are introducing disincentives that destroy even basic relationships instead of stabilizing them. Their policies have helped create men such as myself, who see absolutely no incentive to pursue a relationship in a country where I can go to jail and be robbed blind from a failed relationship or from a woman lying about how I treat her.

I don’t know what creates men such as yourself, but I’m pretty sure it’s not feminism.

Roosh goes on to note that in Ukraine, the kids he sees walking around with their parents “seem quite happy.” Oh, the kids you observe at a distance and know nothing about “seem happy?” That settles it! Top notch social science research work, dude!

Moreover, he adds,

In a place where women are not considered protected, some may even be surprised to never see women with bruises and black eyes, or see them getting beat up every day, screaming for help.

Yep, that’s right, so long as women aren’t walking around with visible bruises and/or getting beaten up in public, all is well and we can assume that domestic violence is not a problem at all.

In fact, as even a quick visit to useful web site known as “Google” will reveal, domestic violence is in fact a huge problem in Ukraine. Indeed, according to one 2009 survey cited here, a staggering 44% of Ukrainians have been victims of DV; 75% of them never sought help for it — not altogether surprising, for while the country does in fact have laws against it, they are generally fairly ineffective.

Perpetrators of domestic violence in Ukraine act with impunity. The Law on the Prevention of Violence in the Family does not provide adequate protection to victims of violence and perpetuates the myth that women are to blame for the violence that is perpetrated against them. Police often fail to take action when women report domestic violence and sometimes react inappropriately. Women who attempt to take the perpetrators to court are hampered by widespread corruption or find that the punishments imposed are inadequate.

And while DV in the US is down, government officials in Ukraine warn that DV rates there may be rising.

Roosh, if he knows any of this, doesn’t really give a shit.

There will always be an unfortunate level of violence between man and woman, but any attempt to fix it through random laws and policies, as has been done in America, will only make it worse. Nature, in spite of its flaws, is more often right than wrong.

Hi, Kitteh :) No, I have a trackpad on a MacBook, so right-clicking is a bit of an ordeal for me (holding down that command key is So. Much. Effort. Srsly). I must have clicked on something, though. Huh.

By the way, I’ve been kind of lurking lately, but I haven’t been keeping up with the conversations here enough to contribute anything. I’m enjoying you all immensely, though, so keep on keeping on.

In a certain way, what we’ve done together here was a kind of rehearsals : one day, I’ll lose everything because I’ll say something offensive, sexist, homophobic, ableist or whatever, something like having an opinion of my own which contradicts the multiculti/feminist doxa for example.

Or you could stop saying bigoted bullshit to people. That’s an option.

Honey, being a vocal bigot does not make you a brave freedom fighter. It just makes you an asshole, and assholes are not exactly in short supply.

I have exactly zero sympathy for someone who works in the FUCKING TECH FIELD who doesn’t understand that what you say on a public forum using your real name might get you in trouble in your actual life.

As for Dawkins, what is it with douchebag atheists and claiming that pedophilia is ok because their experience with it was nbd? The Amazing Atheist loooooves pedophilia. I could try and get real deep into the psychology of this but I’m not qualified, so instead I’ll just sit here baffled. Even if they weren’t actually bothered, putting words into someone else’s mouth who was is despicable.

errr – i find it a bit funny he is using bees and ants as an analogy, considering bees rarely ever sting (it’s an act of suicide) let alone sting ants – why any bee would feel provoked by an ant is beyond me, but maybe Roosh can explain

Harris, Dawkins, Hitchens … at least three of the Four Bloviators are scumbags. All I know of Dennett is that he was keen on that idiotic, patronising “Brights” label, which says to me he’s not as bright as he thought he was.

Well, I’ve only read stuff from the first three ones and only Hitchens could actually write. As much as an asshole warmonger he turned into, I gotta give him that and the waterboarding. But that isn’t even faint praise, more like.. “huh, so that happened”. PZ is just…. wow. I hope my guts are as intact if or when I reach his age.

Wow, Roosh. Like any thinking person who’s heard of you, I knew you were human garbage in a moral sense, but I didn’t realise you were quite so fucking stupid as well. “This one time in Ukraine I saw a guy hit his girlfriend in the street, and nobody who was watching gave a shit. Bet you’re bummed that you messed up that sweet deal here in the US, eh ladies?”

My favourite part about the Dawkins thing is where he says that we shouldn’t judge people in the past by modern standards. This from a man who’s made his living, at least in part, by pointing out the moral failings in religious texts written 2,000-3,000 years ago. (For the record, I too think that many of the characters and events depicted as moral in the Big Three holy texts are in fact indefensibly barbaric, but then I’ve never felt the need to suddenly turn all moral relativist in defence of molesting children.)

I’ve developed something of a mantra. “Someday, if all goes well, I will have been a terrible person.”

It’s a way of reminding myself that, for all my progressive attitudes and my efforts to be a good ally and so forth, at some point, if we continue to actually advance along the lines I’m hoping we do, my baseline prejudices and views–things that I can’t even see from where I’m standing, because fish-water–will be considered utterly morally repugnant. And my entire purpose in being a good progressive and a good ally is to bring about the day when I, as I am, am considered a prime example of how even the good people of this era were horrible human beings–preferably, as fast as possible.

It’s a useful reminder that I’m not all that special, even on my best days. It’s something I wish a lot of progressive ‘leaders’ (particularly those of privileged backgrounds) would learn.

Reading Roosh’s forum post about that brogrammer. I’m trying to understand the logic: a white dude dropping the “n” word with no context is not “race trolling”; but Anil Dash criticizing that dude’s misogyny, without even mentioning race, while in possession of brown skin is “race trolling”. I’d dare him to be more transparently racist, but I’m afraid of what the result would be.

re the Popehat thread, I saw Pollock was being his slimy self again. It’s interesting to compare his comments about how/why people are nasty, with the attempts he made to be nasty in the “consent” thread.

I’ve been informed by assorted RealSkeptics and BraveHeros that if names aren;t named and the incident was reported to the police at the time we can’t possibly believe that it even happened. So Dawkins must be an attention seeking professional victim, a spiteful liar or a cowardly “defector” in the war on paedophilia.

Wait, what? He didn’t suffer harm because no one told him “unspeakable horrors had been inflicted on him” but religion inevitably causes suffering? Some one direct me to where religion is called an “unspeakable horror” (inb4 being directed to the cult of Cthulhu)

As someone who has been discriminated out of a job because of an immutable characteristic (being trans*), who has seen a partner bullied and fired out of a position because someone close to the boss thought she wasn’t feminine enough “to fit in” because she would play on the company sports team with the boys, who have seen friends set up with impossible tasks and then berated and eliminated when they make the tiniest mistake (and knowing they were set these tasks for publicly supporting me within in the company)…

I just can’t help but bitterly laugh at all these “wannabe martyr” stories from men who are “horrified” at the “power” of minorities to “get a person fired” just because they decided to do something incredibly dickish under their own name often as the company’s representative and then got shitcanned for it.

I mean, seriously? I’m supposed to weep and beat my chest that some middle class white male fucks who will actually receive enough to live on by unemployment and severance packages and who will have no fucking problem getting a job from a separate scumbag employer have somehow suffered unduly when something they actually did and is legitimately unprofessional bites them on the ass.

I’ve seen people fired for such petty and bizarre reasons, manufactured causes and bullshit inside politics and here I’m supposed to spare sympathy for someone who actually deserved to get fired over being a complete shit? Sorry, empathy is all out on that one, try the store the next town over.

Also, hey, do you hate the economic impact firings have and wish people could be taken care of when they make a mistake? Even if they are horrible people? Excellent! So do we. So how about you stop supporting the assholes who block all attempts to fix the social safety net because “they put those feminazis in their place” and actually support economic policies that provide a guaranteed living wage no matter what you’ve done in your life to fuck things up?

I think any legislation that discourages Roosh from interacting with other human beings is good legislation…

Also for all the yakking he does about “Nature” being the right way to judge things he seems to be fairly ignorant of how many species out there, even among our closest relatives, have females as the more dominant and physically imposing gender of the species. Of course this is the man whose entire understanding of animal mating behaviours is based around outdated ideas about the social structure in wolf packs so we can’t expect much.

This blog is the only place on the internet I can be entertained, enraged and enlightened all in one comment thread. I went through the usual rolling of eyes at Roosh, then complete and utter disgust at Dawkins, then excitement about how awesome bees are.

I’ve gone from seeing Dawkins as that friend you like but is sometimes embarrassing, to not wanting to see/hear or bother with him ever again. Enough already. I always thought the whole religion = child abuse thing was a stretch, in general, but holy shit. Now sexual abuse isn’t abuse. Ok.

“I think Richard Dawkins suffered no short- or long-term harm because no one told him again and again that unspeakable horrors had been inflicted on him and that his life was forever ruined.”

You know what, I think it’s a good message that rape, sexual assault, abuse, etc. doesn’t necessarily cause the victim to feel ANY necessary, single emotional outcome, including terrible trauma and despair.

I mean, it IS a legit concern that survivors may worry that they didn’t have the “right” reaction, or they didn’t feel bad “enough.” It’s an important thing to be saying. But, uh, if we had to choose which side to err on, I think we’re pretty safe focusing our attention on the people who ARE traumatized.

And anyway, you can’t make that point without simultaneously making the point that the immorality, awfulness, evil, malice, and illegality of being an abuser or rapist does not directly relate to the emotions experienced by the victims. Which is… exactly what Dawkins is not doing.

tedthefed – not to mention that the whole “don’t tell them and they’ll never be upset” plays right into the hands of pedophiles who groom children to think being raped is normal, and the pressure on rape victims generally to be silent, both of which were pointed out on the Pharyngula threads. Plus, as someone said there, isn’t it better to recognise that rape is an appalling crime, and to expect it might traumatise someone, if there has to be a default?

@cheburashka I would love to see the bee/ant/worm story played out by actual insects and narrated to tell the story. It’s too bad it has absolutely no basis in reality for anyone to ever get those shots. Forever dying at worms being the mortal enemy of bees and ants.

RE; Daniel Dennett. I used to be quite a big fan of the new atheists (though nowadays I would be more critical of at least some of their arguments and always thought that some elements of their work was wrong for example Harris defending racial profiling). I would honestly say that from what I remember there isn’t a lot that’s objectionable about Dennett. The “Brights” thing is probably the thing he’s advocated that is the most likely to annoy people. In all honesty, I always thought that Dennett was a bit of a bad fit with the other three – they’re all much more polemical than he is and he always comes across as more of a harmless ivory tower philosopher type. Though I don’t keep up on all the atheist news, etc, so it’s possible I missed/forgot him doing something stupid; forgive me if that’s the case.

I get that impression of Dennett, too, without following that much about the atheist movement (bein’ as how I’m not atheist). I certainly haven’t heard anything worse than that about him, and yes, he does seem an odd fit with the three ranters. The whole Brights thing was so eye-rollingly silly. I don’t think he came up with the term, did he – just supported it? And whoever-it-was saying that the term for “supernaturalists” wouldn’t be Dims or Dulls or whatever is obviously implied by atheists being Brights – oh no, it’d be “Supers.” Um, yeah, right, welcome to the real world. Very ivory-tower, lol.

I get the feeling that if whoever coined the term had read the slimy rubbish of characters like the Amazing Atheist Asshole, they’d have dumped the term at once. Granted they were presumably looking for something positive in the face of too many USian attitudes, but wow, that term missed the mark SO badly.

Yeah I read some Dennett and Dawkins for a philosophy course in college and lost my copy of Dennett’s Kinds of Minds when I loaned it out. Dawkins I “lost”, Dennett I liked enough to loan out and lose that way.

Idk what that says about him as a person, but as a writer he’s far less annoying. One of the arguments he made was does it really matter if animals like frogs have much simpler minds? Aren’t they worthwhile in their own right anyways? And I’ve always liked that one, being a fish keeper and all — no, my babies aren’t capable of human thought, but they aren’t furniture either (I hold a special place of loathing for people who treat aquariums as decor)

What I always notice about Roosh is his crappy sartorial style. His looks he can’t do much about (well his choice in beards is dubious, but even that’s not as malleable as all that), but his clothes? They look like the last rummage through a charity shop’s bargain bin.

Hey, I look like I last rummaged through a bargain bin about five years ago and haven’t bought anything since. Currently wearing my literal last pair of jeans (knees and hems long since gone) and a humane society volunteer shirt.

One of the arguments he made was does it really matter if animals like frogs have much simpler minds? Aren’t they worthwhile in their own right anyways?

Definitely give him props for that one! That’s a major plus.

Speaking of animal minds, Louis and I played a new kind of chess last night – Cat and Dog Chess. No idea what the rules are, if there are any other than “move these things”. Quadrille tended to whine and nudge my elbow as hints, and Katie took the direct route of battng pieces with her paw, then sitting looking smug.

I know David skipped over it, but everyone go read the ant/bee fable Roosh opens with because it is amazing. He started with a metaphor, and then thought far too hard about the logistics of it as a literal thing.

He looks like he thinks he’s going casual when he’s really going sloppy.

When she sees someone not properly dressed/ groomed, my mum scornfully describes them as a “refugee from a ragbag”. (When I was a kid, I always imagined some little fairy style person escaping from the bag of cleaning rags that always hung in the laundry.)

Hey, do you need anything else I might have? Cuz I have access to a wealth of nonsense currently and you may as well ask, worst case is I haven’t got it. Toothbrush case? My electric doesn’t fit in it. Any sort of small bags for sorting stuff in your backpack?

Consider me a freebie variety shop and ask away :) (and since I know you worry about strings being attached, the only string is the one you know — I gotta see Sneak’s tentacle impersonation)

Hmmm. I actually might be in the market for small, light bags; our backpack is about 85% one enormous pocket, and while I have a lot of plastic grocery bags, I’m not sure those would be best, and my hygienics bag is… actually really disgusting, after being used for years and years on end.

Cerberus: ‘a guaranteed living wage’? there is no way to do that for many companies- it’s a great idea, but if you implement it, you will force many small companies out of business that just can’t pay that to everyone.
That is calling FORCING a company to do business by mandate- look at the Canadian medical system.

Tan: The Canadian Healthcare System works fine (a damned sight better than the US System, if you are a patient. A bit less-so if you are a Health Insurance Executive looking to get multi-million dollar bonuses).

Living Wages work well too. The places which have them are doing well. Look at Santa Monica Calif. Against strong “business” opposition they passed one. Shock of shocks, there weren’t any businesses which went under. They didn’t move across the border either. In fact there are more people who want to start a shop in Santa Monica than there is space to put them.

Why? Because it’s a self-supporting (or defeating) feedback system: people who have money can spend it, those who don’t, can’t.